The invention relates generally to the field of communications, and more particularly to a method for automatically establishing a conference over the Internet from a desktop application.
Although the telephone industry is heavily computerized, the procedure for establishing and joining conference calls is still very much a manual one. Conference calls are reserved by calling a human operator who receives the information, types the information into a computer, confirms the reservation, and then provides the caller with a call-in number and a password for use when joining the conference. Similarly, when joining the conference, each participant again calls a human operator. The operator asks each participant for the conference password and validates it, sometimes obtains information about the caller, and ultimately connects the participant into the conference call. Some telephone companies are beginning to allow users to make their own reservations via the Internet, although participants must still go through a human operator in order to join a conference. MCI, for example, allows users to make requests for conference reservations via the Internet with its networkMCI Conferencing Net Scheduler product. Nonetheless, the MCI system still depends on personnel to read the requests, make the reservations, and send confirmations to the customers. There also exist some Internet applications for starting teleconferences from a browser, such as the SPRINT Internet Conference Center. The Sprint system allows users to set up and manage conference calls from a browser, whereby the users log in to the Sprint conference web site and enter the telephone numbers of the participants with whom that they would like a conference, and the conference begins almost immediately.
Other conferencing applications include one which provides control of the conferencing bridge from a PC desktop using software developed to interface with a particular audio bridge. Most audio bridge producers provide bridge control software to their customers as well. Multilink, Latitute and Dialogic are three companies that currently produce audio bridges with audio bridge control software which enables a user to reserve/start audio conferences from a friendly user interface.
Today, almost every computer user has a desktop organizer which consists of a calendar utility and a personal address book. The calendar utility helps to manage personal appointments and schedules. The personal address book, on the other hand, is a small database that is used to keep telephone numbers, names, addresses, etc. For teleconference scheduling, generally, users check their calendars for availability, look up the telephone numbers of their friends or colleagues from their personal address books, and then call the teleconference service provider to set up a conference.
What is desired, and is an object of the present invention, is to provide a method for automating the teleconference set up process from an existing office desktop application.
It is another object of the invention to provide a system and method for automating the teleconferencing process by connecting desktop office applications, such as calendar and address book, to the audio bridge of the teleconference service provider.
It is still another object of this invention to provide such a system and method by which users will be able to automatically schedule conferences and mark them on their desktop calendars using the information in their personal address books.
Yet another object of the invention is to enable calendar applications to start teleconferences automatically at the scheduled conference time without any operator intervention.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a method for collecting conference set up information from the user and/or automatically from the existing desktop office applications, such as calendar and personal address book, with the user only providing the date and time for the conference. Other information to be collected would optionally be determined by the specific conference server employed and may include: names and addresses of invitees, conference duration, and the account to be charged.
Another object of the invention is to provide a method to invoke a platform independent secondary application to schedule or to start a teleconference, to pass the conference information to the secondary application which establishes a connection with the teleconference service provider over the Internet, to send requests to schedule, start, or end a conference, to dial or hangup with participants, to add to or drop from a conference; to get conference status, and to get party status, with the teleconference service provider responding by sending back a dial-in number, passcode, the conference status, and acknowledgments.
It is also an object to provide the aforementioned secondary platform independent application as an application which is portable to other platforms, which coexists with office application, and which is capable of establishing and exchanging data with the conference service provider over the Internet.
These and other objects are realized by the present invention wherein a desktop application is invoked directly by the user and allows the user to provide the information necessary for establishing the conference. The desktop application can obtain the necessary information in a variety of ways including, at the simplest level, having the user invoke it at the command line and specify the input as arguments. In a more user-friendly implementation, the application displays a form with fields for user input of the necessary information.
If the conference is scheduled to dial-out the participants and is marked as a calendar entry, the desktop application stores the conference information in a database. A record in this database includes the start/end time of a conference, the telephone numbers of the participants, the choice of service provider, and, if appropriate, an account id. Once a teleconference calendar entry is created, the process for establishing the conference starts and proceeds automatically. At the scheduled time, the desktop application optionally warns the user by running an alarm function to remind them of the time of the conference. Thereafter, a secondary application is invoked, either manually or automatically, and the conference information is passed to the secondary application for automatic establishment of the conference. When the secondary application is invoked, it establishes an Internet connection with the service provider and exchanges data messages to start and monitor the audio conference. The status of the participants and the status of the conference are reported to the user by the secondary application via a user interface. The conference service provider receives the telephone numbers of the participants over the established data connection and starts dialing out to the participants. When the participants answer, they are all connected to the audio bridge in order to establish an audio conference. In one modification of the invention, the service provider returns a dial-in number and a password, upon request, to be distributed to the participants, so that any users who are unable to provide a dial-out number in advance may dial in to the scheduled conference.